Writing Lives in China: the Case of Yang Jiang a DISSERTATION
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Writing Lives in China: the Case of Yang Jiang A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Jesse L. Field IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Paul Rouzer June, 2012 © Jesse Field 2012 i Acknowledgements My advisor, Paul Rouzer, introduced me to Tan yi lu (On the art of poetry, 1946) and Guan zhui bian (Chapters on pipe and awl, 1978) by Qian Zhongshu (1910-1998). I was fascinated, puzzled and intimidated by these strange and difficult texts. When I looked up Qian Zhongshu, I found that his wife Yang Jiang (b. 1911) had penned a memoir called Women sa (We three, 2003), about Qian’s death and the life he, she and their daughter Qian Yuan (1937-1995) had had together. I read the text and was deeply moved. Moreover, I was struck that Yang Jiang’s writing was a kind of contemporary manifestation of classical Chinese poetry. I decided to take a closer look. Thanks to Ann Waltner, Wang Liping, and my classmates in the 2006-7 graduate seminar in Chinese history for discussions and encouragement to begin this project. My first paper on Yang Jiang received invaluable feedback from participants in the 2007 “Writing Lives in China” workshop at the University of Sheffield, especially Margaretta Jolly and Wu Pei-yi. A grant from the CLA Graduate Research Partnership Program (GRPP) in the summer of that year helped me translate We Three. Parts of this dissertation underwent discussion at meetings of the Association for Asian Studies in 2009 and 2011 and, perhaps even more fruitfully, at the Midwest and Southwest Regional conferences for Asian Studies in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011. Thanks to Sherry Mou, Yang Xin, Shannon Canella, Steven Day, Jeffrey Kinkley, Charles Laughlin, and Claire Conceison for their gracious friendship and helpful feedback on work in this period. Charles also organized the 2009 meeting of the Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature (ACCL) in Beijing, where I spoke on Yang Jiang in Chinese and was soundly criticized by Chen Xiaomei. I feel a deep sense of gratitude for that experience, too. A major boost to this project came in the form of the workshop “Celebrating 100 Years of Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang,” hosted at the University of British Columbia and organized by Christopher Rea. My work benefited enormously from the community, structure and support of that Vancouver gathering, which included Chris Rea, Wendy Larson, Theodor Huters, Alex Huang, John Weinstein, Amy Dooling, Yaohua Shi, Judith Amory, Ronald Egan, Ji Jin, Wang Yugen, Tiziana Lioi, Carlos Rojas, Zhang Enhua, and Wang Yao. As a direct result of the workshop, my translations of Yang Jiang’s works appeared in the winter 2011 issue of Renditions. The rigorous and detailed editing of Christopher Rea, Theodore Huters, Sheldon Ip and other staff members of Renditions was truly a revelation. Thanks so much to Chris, Ted and Renditions for including me in their pages. The University of Minnesota department of Asian Languages and Literatures has been a gracious and patient institutional home. With their support, I created the course ii “Writing Lives in China” and taught it twice, in 2009 and in 2010. I owe a debt of thanks to the students of this class. Their discussions and writing about Yang Jiang’s Gan xiao liu ji (Six Records of a Cadre School, 1981) helped shape the readings in these pages. In 2011-12, I had the opportunity to teach courses at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, thanks to a UMN Pre-Doctoral Diversity Fellowship awarded by the Graduate School Diversity Office. The support of this office, especially supervision and mentorship from Noro Andriamanalina, was of crucial importance in bringing this project to a close. In Duluth, I found a welcome home in the UMD department of English, and weekly meetings Prof. Krista Twu provided excellent advice for writing, teaching, and pursuing a career in the field of higher education. I shared my office with three classmates, and we formed a little community of dissertation writers who propped each other up, discussed our writing and ideas, and made each other some very impressive gourmet meals. Thanks so much, George Hoagland, Jessica Nammakal, and Eli Meyerhoff! Over the course of the busy spring of 2012, members of my committee read the draft chapters of this dissertation and provided me with detailed suggestions for improvement. Thanks very much to Paul Rouzer, Ann Waltner, Jason McGrath, and Simona Sawhney for their time and patience. iii To Carol Gene Field (1933-2010) iv Abstract This dissertation is about the writer Yang Jiang 杨绛 (b. 1911). It opens up new intellectual territory by bringing together many forms of Chinese writing to describe the common influence of xie renwu or ‘writing the person.’ Though best-known for Gan xiao liu ji (Six records of a cadre school), Yang Jiang’s memoir of experiences in a labor camp for intellectuals during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Yang Jiang’s career as a whole testifies to the living value of story and portraiture manifested in plays, personal essays, literary criticism, translation, short stories, novels and biographical literature. Moreover, Yang Jiang’s readership runs the gamut from enthusiastic welcome, in 1940s Shanghai, to rejection and silencing in the 1950s and 60s, and rising sharply upward again to iconic status in the 1990s and 2000s. Applying the terms and propositions of the interdisciplinary study of life writing, I identify the unity of Yang Jiang’s writing in its focus on the person, and in particular the constant return to discourses of self, identity, subjectivity and social value entwined around traditional Confucian terms of personhood – especially qing, the sublime connection between persons based on feeling. Critics inside China call Yang Jiang one of the best prose stylists of her time; general readers call her life story inspirational; in 2011, newspaper reports identify in Yang Jiang the moral and aesthetic qualities most recommended for China today. And yet, her work has received scant attention from scholars outside of China. My dissertation begins the project of filling in this lacuna through historical contextualization and close readings centered on her post-Cultural Revolution writing. The aesthetic qualities of Chinese rhetoric, the classical and romantic qualities of Yang Jiang’s prose, and the deeper political and social implications of her writing since the late 1970s are major topics of the chapters. Throughout, I focus on gender and class, arguing that Yang Jiang deploys traditional v exemplary life writing (the image of the “good wife and model mother,” for example) to build up a discourse of personhood that contains a renewed version of traditional Chinese cultural values. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................... i Abstract............................................................................................................................ iv Table of Contents ............................................................................................................ vi List of Figures................................................................................................................. vii Chapter One: Yang Jiang and Literary Affect.................................................................. 1 Chapter Two: The Literary Criticism of Yang Jiang...................................................... 41 Chapter Three: “Reflections in Reverse,” Yang Jiang’s Short Fiction, 1979-1981....... 79 Chapter Four: Six Records of a Cadre School.............................................................. 111 Chapter Five: Baptism and the return of Enlightenment-Confucian Structure of Feeling ...................................................................................................................................... 147 Chapter Six: “About to Drink the Tea”: Yang Jiang’s Essays, 1981-1991.................. 178 Chapter Seven: “All Alone, I Think Back on We Three”: Yang Jiang’s New Intimate Public............................................................................................................................ 208 Conclusion.................................................................................................................... 240 Appendix I: “On Qian Zhongshu and Fortress Besieged”........................................... 244 Appendix II: We Three, Parts I and II .......................................................................... 288 Appendix III: Arriving at the Margins of Life: Answering My Own Questions: Excerpt ...................................................................................................................................... 336 Bibliography................................................................................................................. 344 vii List of Figures Figure 1: Idealized intimacy between peasants and intellectuals undermined in Six... 123 Figure 2: A properly managed household, here illustrating opportunities for shen jiao 身 教 (“teaching of the self”), from the Jiating quanbao shu (Household encyclopedia)........................................................................................................ 192 Figure 3: Interior of the Qian Zhongshu Historic Home, a museum operated by the Wuxi Municipal Government............................................................................... 213